Casey Schorr

Since the start of 2008 I've been trying to simplify my life. Naturally, I turned to technology-based solutions to help me accomplish my new year's resolution.

The first thing I did on January 1, 2008 was sign up for SimulScribe. This was a good decision - I'll never have to listen to another voice mail... ever! More about this wonderful service in a future blog post.

My latest endeavor is with a service called Earth Class Mail. ECM's tag line is "your postal mail online". When I signed up for the service I was able to choose a mailing address in one of 20 cities. They don't have an address in Denver (yet) but I was assured they were adding more addresses soon. Now I can view scanned images of my sealed envelopes online as soon as the mail is received at the ECM processing facility. I can then choose to have my mail securely scanned to PDF, recycled, shredded or forwarded to myself or someone else. I'm really excited about this service. I think businesses have the most to gain from a service like ECM. Most consumers won't pay $10/month for this and have major privacy concerns. When I told my girlfriend about ECM the conversation went something like this... "what, you are going to pay some stranger to open your mail? Are you crazy?!?" It will be interesting to see how ECM communicates their value proposition to consumers & reassures them of their privacy.

My first few pieces of mail arrived at the ECM facility this week. After an e-mail alerting me of new mail in my ECM inbox, I logged in and found a scan of the front & back of the envelope. I selected the mail piece and clicked on "scan". Less than 24 hours later I got another e-mail alerting me the mail piece had been opened and scanned to a PDF. I downloaded the PDF to my computer and archived the original mail piece at ECM's facility in Oregon. I can retrieve the archived letter whenever and have it shredded, recycled, or shipped to me anywhere in the world - via my web browser!

We're also piloting ECM for Printfection. Even though we're a small company we get tons of postal mail. We already scan our transactional mail (invoices, important confirmation lettters, etc.) and save them as PDFs. ECM seems like the next logical step to a completely paper-free, streamlined office.

I think services like Earth Class Mail are going to revolutionize how people consume basic services like postal mail. USPS address forwarding is terrible. I've moved about 5 times in the last 6 years and wish I had Earth Class Mail years ago!